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Priority and Desert

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Abstract

Michael Otsuka, Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey have challenged the priority view in favour of a theory based on competing claims. The present paper shows how their argument can be used to recast the priority view. All desert claims in distributive justice are comparative. The stronger a party’s claims to a given benefit, the greater is the value of her receiving it. Ceteris paribus, the worse-off have stronger claims on welfare, and benefits to them matter more. This can account for intuitions that at first appear egalitarian, as the analysis of an example of Larry Temkin’s shows. The priority view, properly understood, is desert-adjusted utilitarianism under the assumption that no other claims pertain.

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Notes

  1. Otsuka and Voorhoeve’s version of this case involved decision-making on behalf of a single person. They call it the ‘one-person case’, as do Voorhoeve and Fleurbaey (2012). I have preserved the structure of the case while expanding the effects to both people. This is consistent with Otsuka’s and Voorhoeve’s observation that ‘whatever claims we make …about what one ought to do in cases involving single persons apply, mutatis mutandis, to groups of identically fated people created by such replication’ (2009: 175–76 n. 8).

  2. The Interpersonal Trade-off Case corresponds to what Otsuka and Voorhoeve call their ‘multi-person case with certainty’ (2009: 179 n. 16).

  3. Voorhoeve and Fleurbaey call their equivalent cases the ‘Two-Person Intrapersonal Trade-off Case’ and the ‘Two-Person Interpersonal Trade-off Case’

  4. By this I mean that Bert has a stronger claim on a tricycle. This assertion can be challenged, as Patrick Tomlin (2012) shows. I cannot go into the matter here.

  5. The first term is Ingmar Persson’s, and the second is Paula Casal’s (2007: 309).

  6. Compare John Broome’s argument that fairness is ‘a relative matter’ that must sometimes be weighed against maximizing the ‘general good’ (1984: 43–45). We perform this balancing, I am arguing here, by treating claims as a coefficient of utility.

  7. I am grateful to Erin Taylor for raising this point.

  8. See my criticism of Feldman above. I have proposed a solution to the mere addition paradox in Rendall (2012).

  9. Cf. Shelly Kagan’s similar argument about egalitarianism (1999).

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Acknowledgment

I thank Gerald Lang, Dominic Roser and audience members at the 2012 annual conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory for comments.

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  1. School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Matthew Rendall

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Rendall, M. Priority and Desert. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 939–951 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9420-9

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